How do you know if you are seeing a strength in your child? To help parents figure out if what they’re seeing in their child is a strength, could be a strength, or is definitely not a strength, I use the four-part matrix developed at the Centre of Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP). The psychologists who developed this matrix classify behavior into one of four types: realized strengths, unrealized strengths, learned behavior, and weakness.

You won't be surprised to learn that children don't really relate to the psychological terminology of 'realized strengths' and 'unrealized strengths' so when I work with kids I use the terms 'core strength' (because the strength is a core part of who they are) and 'growth strength' (because it’s something small that can grow big with practice).

Let’s take a closer look at the four types...

1. Core Strengths (aka Our “Go-To” Strengths)

Core strengths are the talents, skills and positive personality traits that fuel high levels of performance, energy, and use. They’re obvious to us and those who know us. You could say they’re the essence of who we are, because if your core strengths were taken away, you wouldn’t be you. Maybe your child has always been good at balance beam (physical ability), could hold a tune from a young age (music ability), or had an innate understanding of design and technology (spatial awareness). Maybe they've always been brave or compassionate or were born with a calm, serene nature (positive personality traits).

2. Growth Strengths

Growth strengths energize us and offer the potential for good performance, but use is typically low to medium. You may see only glimpses of them in your child, but they’ll shine when given the opportunity to be developed. When your child is using a growth strength, you’re likely to notice that they are energized and showing early signs of good performance. For example, maybe you are stating to notice that your child's emotional intelligence is above what woudl be expected for his/her age. Maybe her/his chess skills are still blossoming but you are seeing signs of a fast learning curve.Growth strengths are fascinating because they don’t look like strengths when they’re still growing, but they can shoot up quickly when they are discovered.

You can encourage your child to use their growth strengths by:

noticing the strength they're drawing on

pointing out how their performance is improving

letting them know that you see the positive energy they're exuding when they're using the strength

offering low-pressure opportunities to use that strength

It takes a lot of energy to build up your courage to use a growth strength. Think of the last thing you tried that gave you butterflies in your stomach, fitful sleep, or a lot of “what if” worry. But when you try, and it works, you get a huge shot of energy and you feel fantastic: I did it!!!! You’re growing that particular strength muscle, and it feels great. That’s the experience you want for your child.

3. Learned Behavior

While our strengths reside within us, learned behaviors are things we need to “add in” from the outside. Most often we develop them through the requirements of parents, school, and others. As such, our motivation to perform them comes from our desire to please others, operate smoothly in the world, or gain external rewards. One of my graduate students has a talent for manuscript editing. She’s really good at it (performance), but it doesn’t give her high energy, and her motivation is simply to earn money to support herself through her PhD program. That’s a perfectly valid use of a learned behavior, as long as she doesn’t get pulled into doing it so much that it governs her time and attention for too long.

The best way to work with your learned behaviors is to know what they are and slot them into your life in ways that don’t allow them to dominate for long stretches of time.

You can help your child develop learned behaviors, but do so knowing that they’ll require a lot more effort and that it’s unlikely your child will ever reach the level of performance that he will when using his strengths. Also, since they're unlikely to be energized when they're using this behavior, don’t be surprised that you have to remind them a lot. Be patient and remember that your child’s brain isn’t wired to support this particular capacity—but that with practice, neural networks will grow and a new behavior will be formed.

I define weakness similarly to what you’ll find in the dictionary or after a quick Google search. Weaknesses are features regarded as disadvantages or flaws—specifically, a flaw that prevents us from being effective. We can be weak in certain skills, abilities, talents, and aspects of our personality/character.​We all have weaknesses, and it’s important to be real with our kids about that.

Strength-based parenting doesn’t mean you ignore your child’s weaknesses; it allows you to approach them from a new perspective.

In fact, it supports more genuine, less defensive conversations with your child about their weaknesses, because your child knows that your focus is, first and foremost, on their strengths.

There are three important messages to give to your child about weakness:

In my workshops, I ask parents to write their child’s name with their dominant hand. I talk about how each of us has a dominant hand. For me, it’s my right hand. I didn’t choose that. We’re just born with our brain wired in a way that makes one hand easier to use than the other. We build on that propensity and further develop that neural network. We write with ease. Then I say, “OK. Swap hands.” It takes them much longer to write their child’s name with their nondominant hand. It’s messy, even illegible. It’s tiring and somewhat frustrating. When you constantly focus on getting your child to fix their weaknesses, it’s like you’re always asking them to use their nondominant hand. Their performance, energy, and use won’t be nearly as high as when they work from their strengths.​Constantly working on weakness can be tiring, even demoralizing. This is why Alex Linley, PhD, CEO of CAPP, says:

“We succeed by fixing our weaknesses only when we are also making the most of our strengths.”

Noted leadership expert Peter Drucker tells us that exceptional leaders connect strengths with strengths in ways that make weaknesses become irrelevant. He fully grants that we’re all “abundantly endowed with weaknesses” but also that weaknesses are inconsequential to our performance if we are focusing on our strengths

As a University researcher, Lea Waters, PhD, turns her science into strength-based strategies to help organizations, educators and parents around the world build resilience in their employees and children, helping them to thrive. Lea’s keynotes and talks offer her audience a unique blend of science, practice and humor. To find out more about working with Lea or to book Lea for your next event, please fill out this speaker request form.

This is Part 3 in a three-part series on Mindfulness. You can read Part 1 and Part 2here.

I’m often asked whether being strength-based means we can never have negative emotions or feel down when bad things are happening. Of course not. Being strength based doesn’t mean we ignore bad times or falsely keep things positive for our children. We need to be real. Mindfulness is a great way to help us see reality clearly, be present to the negative stuff but also see the strengths so we can build up our resilience.

Highly resilient people experience negative feelings but still hold on to positive feelings. Resilience is strongest when, during great adversity, we can hold negative and positive emotions in tandem and make subtle distinctions between each emotion—something psychologists call emotional complexity.​No matter how good of a parent you are, your kids will face problems, have weaknesses, and be confronted with challenges. Your child can build resilience in the face of challenge only if they don't shrink away from it.

Mindfulness wedded to strengths helps your child meet challenges because they know they can sit with all of their feelings in the present moment, including discomfort, and call on their strengths to bounce back.​

Everyday issues like problems at school and with peers can create a lot of emotional pain for children, but these can be addressed productively through emotional coaching based on mindfulness and strengths.

One simple strategy is to get into the habit of regularly asking your child how they feel. It’s a great way to get feelings on the table and to help your child decide what to do about them by calling on his strengths. You’re helping your child in the moment and helping them develop the emotional complexity they need to grow their strengths in good times and bad.You may be surprised by how receptive your kids are to mindfulness. It means you’re tuning in to them—and that makes them feel good!

Using Mindfulness to Help Your Child Work on Weakness

We all have things we’re not good at. Mindfulness can help our kids deal with what comes hard for them. Suppose your child has problems with math. How would a mindful approach help? Here’s how it might unfold:

1. Be present (bare attention).

Help your child tune in to the situation, their distressing emotions, and the story they're telling themselves. How do they feel when they think about doing their math homework, open the textbook, hit a problem they can’t figure out (frustration, anger, anxiety, helplessness)? What’s the story they're telling themselves about it (I’m stupid, I’ll never get this, I’m just bad at this)? You might ask, “What are the thoughts you’re thinking when you sit down to do this? What voices are going on in your head?” Help them bring those thoughts to the surface and be patient if it takes them a while to articulate their negative thinking. Be there for them without judgment.

2. Reframe.

Help your child replace negative thoughts with strength-based ones by pointing out distortions in their thinking and strengths they could bring to bear. For example:

“Do you think those thoughts are helpful? Do you think they’re really true?”

“Those are interesting thoughts, because I see you’re actually not that way when you _____ [give examples of things the child does well and feels great about].

“Remember that math assignment where you did better than expected? That was amazing. What was different about your thinking that time?”

​Talk about strengths the child has that they could bring to the situation and that would change their self-talk. For example: "Math isn’t my ability, but I know I’m persistent. I can be goal focused. I’m organized. I can stick to the task. I’m curious and I can learn new things. I can ask for help or tutoring. I know I’ll feel good when I master this. There are lots of other things I am good at, like English class, baseball, making videos, taking cars apart.”

3. Choose actions.

With Strength-Based Parenting, you can get creative with your child about how to draw on their strengths to better handle the situation, like the one above. For example, suggest that your child apply thinking from a strength angle:

“English is a strong subject for you and you love it. Let’s look at some of the ways you think when you’re working on an English assignment. Let’s do your English homework tonight and I’ll set your phone to beep every 10 minutes over the next hour. Each time it beeps, stop and check in with how you were feeling and what thoughts were going through your head. Write down your thoughts and feelings on this notepad beside you. At the end of the hour, review your notes. List your feelings and thoughts in one column and add a second column where you rate whether the thoughts and feelings were helpful or harmful to your homework.”

​The next night, take things a step further and try this:

“Let’s try an experiment. For the next 30 minutes, do your math the way you normally do. We’ll set the phone to beep at you every 10 minutes so you can record your thoughts and feelings. Then we’ll rate them as helpful or harmful. For the next 30 minutes after that, do your math, but try to substitute the more helpful thoughts and feelings that you have when you do your English homework. When the beeper goes off, stop and notice what you were thinking and feeling. Then look at your list from when you did your English homework and choose a more helpful thought to substitute.”

Other experiments keyed to the child’s strengths:

Agree to set a timer to work for X amount of time, or a goal to complete X number of problems. Then take a 15-minute break to do some free-floating mind activity your child really loves. Or let the child set a longer-term goal to enjoy an agreed-upon special treat if they get a certain score on a test or exam (strength of goal-setting).

Do the difficult math homework first (when your child is feeling fresh and most able to draw on their strength of persistence).

Help your child have compassion for themself: “This is hard. Just stick it out for 10 minutes, and then you can have a break and a snack. I’m proud of you for sticking this out. You’ve got persistence and you’re gaining clarity about why this challenges you and how your negative thinking is making things worse. This is not as easy for you as other things, but you can get through this.”

Initially, you’ll need to walk your children through each step to help them name their feelings and suggest ideas for reframing their thinking and choosing actions from a strength perspective. You may have to stay close at first, sitting with the child as a comforting presence or checking in to see how things are going. You’ll need to ask, “What strength do you have that can help you here?” But as children get clearer about their strengths, they’ll gradually internalize the mindfulness process, and you’ll need to coach them only if they feel stuck.

***

Have Lea Speak at Your Next Event...

As a University researcher, Lea Waters, PhD, turns her science into strength-based strategies to help organizations, educators and parents around the world build resilience in their employees and children, helping them to thrive. Lea’s keynotes and talks offer her audience a unique blend of science, practice and humor.

This is Part 2 in a three-part series on Mindfulness. You can read Part 1 here. Stay tuned for Part 3.

In Part 1, we learned that, at a basic level, mindfulness is as a structured process of focusing the mind using three simple steps:

Focus your attention on a particular thing (for example, your own breathing, or the present moment).

Notice when your attention has wandered away.

Bring your attention back.

So, You’re Mindful. Now What?

Most mindfulness experts use mindfulness to help people detach from negative thoughts and anxiety. But what do you replace these thoughts with? How do you move into positive action?​I propose using mindfulness to replace negative thoughts with strength-based thinking and work toward good outcomes in negative situations. You can teach your kids to do the same, whether it’s dealing with a tough homework assignment, a tough teacher, a problem with a friend, or a transgression with consequences that must be faced.

I remember reading a mindfulness book in which the author likened our propensity for negative thinking to a radio tuned to a bad news channel 24/7. Why not use mindfulness to retune our frequency to the strengths channel—to ask, “What strengths can I draw on to handle this?” and help our children do the same?

What would happen if we asked our children to mentally rehearse their strengths every day?​

How Mindfulness and Strength-Based Parenting Work Together

Every time your child practices the three steps of mindfulness, they learn how to take more deliberate control over aiming and sustaining their inner awareness and redirecting it when it wanders. Over time, you'll find your child will improve at tuning out distractions and maintaining the sustained introspection that allows them to become aware of patterns in their thoughts and feelings.

Mindfulness helps children understand the full range of their emotions, strengths, and weaknesses. This is highly useful in Strength-Based Parenting because it prompts self-insight about unhelpful mental habits likely to block strengths development, such as procrastination, pessimism, and self-doubt. It gives your child a better chance of growing strengths through adversity.​Research shows that mindfulness, when practiced over time, fosters positive emotions, which makes it easier to tap into strengths. For example, my daughter Emily tells me that when she’s painting, she notices a “tingly feeling.” My son Nick says he can tell when he’s going to sink a shot in basketball because he gets tunnel vision. All distractions fade and the net seems bigger and wider. Mindfulness helps us to know how it feels when we’re using our strengths and return to them more easily next time. As Ryan Niemiec, PsyD, so eloquently states:

​“Mindfulness opens a door of awareness to who we are and character strengths are what is behind the door.”

While mindfulness helps your children on their strength journey, it also helps you as a strength-based parent, getting you through those challenging moments when you’re trying to hang on to your composure. It also helps in more enduring ways by allowing you to be emotionally present with your children, to really get to know who they are and what they’re capable of. It helps you to open the door and see their strengths.​When you do, you’ll be more likely to notice your child’s strengths happening in the moment. You might detect a sudden shift in enthusiasm, a difference in your child’s tone of voice, or a slight improvement in a skill—perhaps that’s a growth strength to cultivate. You might see that your child is spending a lot of time on a certain interest—high use—a sign of a core strength.

When I teach mindfulness, I use the metaphor of a helium balloon on a string. When you’re mindful, the balloon is positioned directly above your head—fully present to your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the moment. However, like your thoughts, the balloon slowly drifts away. When that happens, you’ll feel a tug on the string. This lets you know your thoughts have wandered from the present moment (maybe you were thinking about a work problem or what you’ll have for dinner). The tug reminds you to gently pull the balloon back over your head again, returning your awareness to the present moment.

Just as it doesn’t matter how often you tug the helium balloon back to your present-moment thoughts when practicing mindfulness, it doesn’t matter how many times you notice your Strength Switch is off. What matters is how much better you get at flicking it back on. And the better you get at mindfulness, the better you’ll get at the Strength Switch.

There are lots of ways to build mindfulness into your family routine. The exercises below focus on becoming mindful of strengths. Most important, don’t turn these into chores for yourself or your kids. Susan Kaiser Greenland, an expert on child mindfulness, rightly states that compulsory mindfulness is an oxymoron. The trick to incorporating mindfulness into strength-based parenting is to keep it fun and playful.

1. A Better Question Than “How Was School Today?”

We know kids don’t really answer that (unless you consider a grunt to be an answer). Instead of “How was school today?” I turn on my Strength Switch when I pick up Nick and Emily from school. On the way home, we share the strengths we’ve used during our day and give an example of a strength we saw in someone else that day. Over time, we’ve noticed patterns about what strengths we tend to use the most—a clue to core strengths. We also discover growth strengths to work on. And, as they tell me about the situations where they used or noticed a strength, I learn what happened at school that day!

I never force this conversation, and there are certainly times where my kids are tired or grumpy and don’t want to talk about strengths. One day, Nick hopped into the car all steamed up about a particular teacher. When I asked him what strengths he had used that day, he said, “I’m not in the mood, Mom.” Fair enough. Then, 10 seconds later, he exclaimed, “I’ll tell you what strengths my teacher did not use today!” and went on to list about eight strengths he felt should have been used but hadn’t been. He ended up speaking longer and more lucidly about strengths during that ride home than on other occasions. You know your kids are really understand strengths when they can spot the absence of them.

2. Strengths Poster

One family exercise is to put up a strengths poster (a fancy term for a blank piece of paper) on the wall and, over the course of a week, ask family members to write on the poster when they spot others displaying strengths.​This exercise puts strengths mindfulness front and center for everyone because you must be in the present moment to notice the strength in the other person. It’s also a bonding activity, allowing everyone to value the strengths of other family members. When my family did this exercise, we saw each other in a new light. At the end of the week Emily had the most examples of bravery recorded on the poster. It highlighted that Emily, the smallest of all of us, was also the bravest. Matt, Nick, and I saw that many of the things we do with ease (e.g., talking to grown-ups, counting the change we get from the cashier, staying upright when the dog jumps up on us) are tougher for Emily because she’s younger. It was empowering for her to see herself through our eyes—as a brave person—whereas she’d previously thought of herself as the weakest because she was the smallest.

3. Strengths Silhouette

When Nick was four, I made him a “strengths silhouette.” He lay on a large sheet of paper and I drew his outline. We stuck the silhouette on his bedroom wall and, over the next few months when we saw him use a strength, we’d write it in his silhouette—or he would; he was learning to write and this was also a good writing exercise. In time, he learned when his performance, energy, and use were high (the markers of a core strength).

That silhouette stayed on his wall for many years. Finally, when he was 10, he took it down. That day was bittersweet for me. I was sad to see the silhouette disappear, but I was glad that Nick had internalized the knowledge that he had strengths within. For Emily at age four, I made a “confidence cape” out of pink fabric and we followed the same idea as the strengths silhouette.

4. Strengths Games

With two of my past Master of Applied Positive Psychology students, Claire Fortune and Lara Mossman, I developed two games based on the VIA strengths model that parents can play with their kids to develop strengths mindfulness and become familiar with strengths language:

VIAINGOis based on BINGO, but instead of filling in a card containing numbers, you note strengths on a sheet of strength words. You can post the sheet on the refrigerator and put a check mark next to a strength each time you see it during the course of, say, a week—signaling a family member’s go-to or core strengths.

Strengths and Ladders, based on the game Chutes and Ladders, is a more structured game that you might save for a weekend or a family vacation. It’s especially good for talking about overusing or underusing strengths—a potential downside of strengths.

Keep a diary and at the end of the day mentally review what strengths you used and how you used them. Meditate on the feelings, thoughts, sensations, and emotions you got from each strength. How does humility, for example, feel in your body? At the end of your strengths reflection session, look at the list of strengths on my website to see if there were other strengths on the list that you used but were blind to. List these in your diary and think about them in your next reflection.

Next, I'll talk about using mindfulness to help your child work on weakness. Stay tuned! ***

Have Lea Speak at Your Next Event...

As a University researcher, Lea Waters, PhD, turns her science into strength-based strategies to help organizations, educators and parents around the world build resilience in their employees and children, helping them to thrive. Lea’s keynotes and talks offer her audience a unique blend of science and practice.

Summer holidays can be a wonder or a wreck! The treats of being on summer vacation – sleeping in, letting go of routine, family trips, abundant downtime - can also throw a family off center and lead to tension and boredom.​Take a strength-based family journey this summer

Taking a strength-based family journey this summer can be a fun way to embrace the positives and steer away from the negatives of holidays. The abundance of time and energy we have during summer break affords us the capacity to help our kids explore and build upon their strengths. Seeing as strengths give us energy and self motivation, they steer us away from boredom and help us use our time in ways that build our wellbeing and family harmony.

Taking a strength-based family journey means we need to know what our strengths are. You can start the holidays by exploring each other's strengths through free surveys and a free strength library on my website (www.strengthswitch.com). Once you are clearer about the strengths of each child, you can sit down as a family and plan out a range of holiday activities that will then build and amplify their strengths. For example, kids who have analytical and problem solving strengths might collect up on a range of puzzles and quizzes to do in their downtime. For those who are artistic, plan some visits to galleries and drop by the art store to make sure the supplies are there for an art project at home. If your kids strengths are more along the social and relationship side of things, ensure they get to see their friends and maybe get them connected to a social improvement project in your local area that will meet their social needs.

Holidays are also a great time to create stretch goals, longer term projects that will take six weeks (on and off) to complete, that tap into your kids' strengths and help them get a sense of accomplishment and growth. Maybe it is getting fit, learning to cook, completing a model airplane, redecorating their room etc. When you feel they have been gaming, eating or sitting for too long invite them to work on their project.​You can also play strengths bingo and whenever you see your kids using a strength, mark it up on a poster or the fridge. Create a friendly competition for who is the best ‘strengths spotter’ in your household; set a family goal for a strength that as a family you’d all like to improve, establish mini-goals along the way and reward your family with a nice dinner or movies for working towards the goal.

​Dealing with arguments and problem behaviors

Holidays bring conflict. Fact.

It’s impossible to spend so much time together and not fight occasionally. As parents, this gives us the opportunity to learn a different approach to handling conflict: the strength-based approach.

First, as counterintuitive as this may seem, try to look at the conflict or problem behavior from a strengths perspective. Misbehavior could be an overuse or underuse of strengths rather than deliberate naughtiness or intention to be annoying. The nosy child who is being intrusive towards their siblings may simply be overusing their strength of curiosity. Curiosity is a good quality but it may backfire if overused, so this is the moment to teach your child how to best use their curiosity in ways that cultivates connection rather than leads to annoyance. The child who has natural leadership, undoubtedly a good strength in many situations, might go too far in the holidays and become bossy. Instead of criticizing your child for their bossiness, educate them about the valuable strength they have and show them when and how their natural leadership works best for them. Teaching your kids how to dial down or dial up their strengths is a great gift to give them and break is the time when we are best placed to do this because as parents we are not so busy rushing around with our other tasks.

Second, when there are arguments or problem behavior ask yourself as the parent “What would I rather see instead of this?” Think about what the positive opposite is that you want and call that forward. This changes the way you react from "Stop Fighting!” to “How about we cooperate here?” or “Let’s use our kindness to fix this”​Third, use your own strengths to redirect the behavior and reduce the tension. Your strengths such as humor, perspective, fairness or kindness can be really useful in the heat of the moment to take the sting away and reset family harmony.

Tips for making the Strength Switch in the heat of the moment​

Pause and recognize your own emotions before you react.

Think about the moment as an opportunity for learning.

Think about the positive opposite that you want, this way you’re not just telling your kids what not to do, you are showing what to do instead and this provides a positive pathway forward.

Look for a strength that your child has that can be used to resolve the situation.

Have some downtime this summer? Consider taking the Strength-Based Parenting Online Course made up of 5 sessions, done over 5 weeks. Each session is made up of a) an online Parent Lesson with Lea, b) Family Time, and c) Keeping It Alive activities where you get to practice your new skills during the week. The course also includes extended learning opportunities where we share the underlying science behind the lessons, if you want to learn more.

The summer holidays can be a time of boredom and tension but it can also be an opportunity to develop our children’s self esteem and create family bonding if you take a strength-based perspective. I hope you enjoy your break and may your strengths shine!

This is part 1 in a three-part series on Mindfulness. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3.

Mindfulness is an active, focused introspection that puts us in touch with our thoughts and feelings as they arise in response to life, allowing us to understand, work with, and direct them. As such, mindfulness holds tremendous power for Strength-Based Parenting and living.

A Brief Definition of Mindfulness

Mindfulness can conjure up images of a yogi sitting in the lotus position “omming,” but the way modern scientists and psychologists work with mindfulness is as a structured process of focusing the mind using three simple steps:

Focus your attention on a particular thing (for example, your own breathing, or the present moment).

Notice when your attention has wandered away.

Bring your attention back.

When you do this, you tune in to what’s happening in your mind in real time, in the flow of life. This gives you awareness of your thoughts and feelings as they happen.

Most people who try mindfulness, especially at first, find that their mind jumps from thought to thought, feeling to feeling. That’s okay. Thinking fast is what minds do. Mindfulness helps your mind slow down a bit. When this happens, you gain the mental space to actually get some control over your thoughts and feelings. It helps you become aware that your thoughts are separate from you. It allows you to gently grab a thought and turn it this way and that, select another to examine, and so on. With practice, you can actually choose which thoughts and feelings to pay attention to and act on—including choosing to have more strength-based thoughts.​When I teach mindfulness, I use the metaphor of a helium balloon on a string. When you’re mindful, the balloon is positioned directly above your head—fully present to your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the moment. However, like your thoughts, the balloon slowly drifts away. When that happens, you’ll feel a tug on the string. This lets you know your thoughts have wandered from the present moment (maybe you were thinking about a work problem or what you’ll have for dinner). The tug reminds you to gently pull the balloon back over your head again, returning your awareness to the present moment.

When I started practicing mindfulness, I expressed frustration to my yoga teacher about how much my mind wandered. She gave me some wise and reassuring advice. She said that it doesn’t matter how often the balloon drifts away. What matters is how much better you get at pulling it back.

“Bare Attention”: The Heart of Mindfulness

At the center of mindfulness is what yogis refer to as “bare attention”—experiencing all thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations without interpretation or judgment. That last part is tricky. Believe me, I know.

While I was writing my book The Strength Switch, Matt and I took the kids on a vacation. The first few days were great, but toward the end, Emily and Nick got sick of each other. Arguments broke out. Things came to a head one night when we sat down to watch a family movie. Emily decided to lie full-length on the couch so no one else (i.e., Nick) could sit on it. So, what did Nick do? He burped in her face—something he finds hilarious, being a teenage boy, and she finds disgusting.And it worked! She jumped off the couch. He jumped on. She had a fit, screaming that he’s the meanest brother in the whole wide world. Meanwhile, he spread his body as wide as he can to occupy every inch of the couch.

I tried to tap into their positive personality traits, encouraging them both to use their perspective and see how much fun they’d been having together for most of the trip. No luck. Both were angry and neither wanted to admit that they do, generally, like each other’s company. Next I tried their forgiveness capacity. Again, I struck out.​At that moment, bare attention became my friend. As the kids got louder and louder, I became aware of my physical sensations. I noticed my chest tightening and my breathing becoming shallow. I felt the urge to cover my ears and shove a handful of popcorn in my mouth. I tuned in to my thoughts and heard my inner critic—that negatively biased part of me—whispering weakness-focused taunts: You’re writing a parenting book and you can’t even get your kids to stop fighting! I became aware that I was holding up this unpleasant scene against a dazzling mental picture I’d created of the idyllic family vacation families are “supposed” to have.

All of this took just a few seconds. But thanks to bare attention, a little bubble of mindful space formed that gave me a small but blessed pause in which to think, not just react. I could tune in to the negative story I was telling myself about what was happening and see how that was only adding pressure to the situation. Although I knew I hadn’t succeeded in getting my kids to use their strengths, in that mindful space, I found the presence to summon my strengths:​

My strengths of reason and perspective: Kids fight sometimes. Fact of life. If a friend told me, “We went on vacation and the kids fought,” would I think she was a bad parent? Ridiculous. Then a memory hit: Remember when we all went to Disneyland and Nick and Emily were fighting because of jetlag? You didn’t let it faze you. As the more experienced traveler, you used perseverance and kindness to help them handle their jetlag, and you showed confidence that it would pass and it did. You can use those strengths now.

My strength of humor: My kids aren’t allowed to fight because I’m writing a parenting book? How absurd is that?!

My strengths of compassion and kindness: It makes me feel sad to speak to myself so critically. I’d feel bad if I heard a friend being so hard on herself. As a parent, I don’t have to be perfect; I just have to be present.

​The mindfulness bubble saved me. I stayed calm. I didn’t yell at the kids to shut them up so I could shut up the critic inside. I didn’t shove the popcorn into my mouth for self-soothing. I weathered it with them, working on de-escalating things until they could become mindful enough of their strengths to get themselves under control. I said things like, “I know it’s frustrating, but let’s just take a minute and think about this… We’ve all been in each other’s faces for too long. How about we go and do something else? ...I know you’re fighting right now, but actually, the rest of the time you’ve had a pretty good time together. Emily, I know you’re telling Nick he’s the meanest brother in the world. But most of the time you’re pretty good friends, you know? Half an hour ago Nick was pushing you on the bike and the two of you were laughing your heads off.”

With mindfulness, I can:​

be present to the situation and to the story I’m telling myself about it;

reframe both; and

choose my actions; and

help my kids learn to do the same.

​These are tremendous powers for us as parents.

Mindful Parent, Mindful Child

Your mindfulness spills over onto your children. In one of my studies, I tested parents for their degree of mindfulness and then tested their children for their levels of mindfulness and stress. The results were staggeringly clear:

The more mindful the parent, the more mindful the child—and the more mindful the child, the less stressed the child.​

Parent mindfulness sets up a successful coping loop in kids. This is something they can take with them wherever they go.

As a mindful parent, you can pass three benefits to your children:​

You’ll do a better job of parenting your child in the moment.

You’ll be modeling an effective way to handle interpersonal conflict and other stressors.

You can coach your child in becoming more mindful.

Mindful parents can help kids become less reactive. When the child is facing challenges or is caught up in negative emotions, parents can ask questions to identify the negative-bias thoughts the child may be having, such as, “What’s the story you’re telling yourself right now?” And, “How about we just take a pause? What are you thinking? Is that a helpful thought? Is it an accurate thought?”

We'll talk more in the coming weeks about using mindfulness to help your child work with weakness and to build their strengths. Stay tuned!

***

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This is Part 3 in a 3-part series on Emotions. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 here.

As we learned inPart 2, parents generally fall into two categories - emotional coaches or emotional dismissers. Most of us practice with our kids the methods we learned from our parents unless we make deliberate effort to change.

To recap: Parents who are emotional coaches consider that talking with their child about emotions is an opportunity for learning, connection and intimacy. They see emotions as a portal that allows them into their child’s world. They know when to sit down and explore their child’s emotional reaction with them, when to give the child space so he can work through his own emotions and when to coach the child to not get overly attached to an emotional reaction. Children growing up with parents who are emotional coaches learn to thoughtfully reflect on their emotions, and how to enhance their positive emotions. Psychologists and Neuroscientists have found that children who grow up with parents who use emotional coaching have a calmer central nervous system, a lower resting heart rate and a healthier emotional brain circuitry. These are the kids who stay cool under pressure!

You might be feeling a little bit daunted at the idea of being an emotional coach, especially if you were raised with emotionally dismissive parents. Believe me, I get your nervousness, but the good news is that becoming an emotional coach is a skill you can learn and Sophie Havighurst, a colleague of mine in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, Australia, has found that moms and dads of toddlers, preschoolers, children and teens have done just that.

After attending the ‘Tuning into Kids’ program (developed by Jon Gottman) parents in her studies were more encouraging of their children’s emotional expression, increased their use of emotion labels, and were more skilled at discussing causes and consequences of emotions with their children. This had positive effects for both the parents and children.

You too can become an emotional coach...

The first step in becoming an emotional coach is to question your own beliefs about the nature of emotions. If you have grown up believing that emotions should be avoided, now is the time to question that belief for the sake of your kids.

The second step in emotional coaching is to help your child to tune into and harness their emotions. I’m including a few ideas as to how to do this below:

1. Get into the Habit of Asking Your Kids How They Feel

My tip is to simply get into the habit of asking your child the following questions: ‘What are you feeling right now? 'How does that make you feel?' ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ By asking these questions you are taking notice of your child’s emotions and they feel supported even if they decide it’s not worth talking about. Mind you, the timing of these questions is important, and if my kids, Nick or Emily, are in an intense emotional state I do not ask these question straight up.​Neuroscience shows us that when we are feeling strong emotions the brain is highly activated in the limbic system. In a highly emotional state, the limbic system takes dominance over our frontal lobe. This state is called an ‘amygdala hijack’ (pronounced am –ig –dulla) because it is as if the amygdala has literally taken your frontal lobe hostage. It has hijacked your thinking mind.

According to prominent child psychiatrist Daniel Siegal when your child is in a state of amygdala hijack they won’t be able to answer your question because the answer requires them to be thinking with their frontal lobe. Your best approach is to calm them down with soothing words, a calm tone of voice, compassionate facial expressions and calm body language.

When your child feels calm again the blood flow will disperse from their limbic system and go back to the frontal lobe allowing them to think clearly and reasonably about the problem and the emotions they just experienced. This is when you can ask them how they are feeling and do they want to talk about it.

Siegal offers a useful metaphor that I have found works well with my children and that is the idea of the downstairs brain (the limbic system) and the upstairs brain (the frontal lobe).

When children are in a state of emotional distress they’re in their downstairs brain and they need to feel that you are ‘there’ for them to help them calm down. Only then will they be ready to climb back to their upstairs brain. You can use mindfulness techniques. A hug or a laugh will do the trick too. When my children see me get stressed they’ll often say “Mom, do you need to climb back to your upstairs brain?”

2. Encourage Your Child to Explore Their Emotions By Using Metaphors

You can encourage your child to explore their emotions by using metaphors. You don’t have to use the word ‘metaphor’ with your children, rather you can ask them to describe something that their emotion might also be like. Questions that help children to develop emotional differentiation include: If your feeling was a color, what color would it be? Where do you feel this emotion in your body? What shape do you think this emotion is? If this emotion was an animal, what animal would it be? Does this emotion have a smell? Nick thinks happiness smells like mint and Emily says love smells like popcorn.​Recently, Emily had a meltdown, when we spoke together afterward and I asked her how she was feeling she told me, "Mom, sometimes I get so angry that it feels like a bolt of lightning shoots through my body." The next time she seemed angry, I asked her, "Do you have lightning inside you?” She paused and then said, "No, I’m not angry, just frustrated." The metaphor of lightning worked wonders. In that moment she was able to label her feeling, differentiate between two types of negative emotions and de-escalate herself from anger to frustration. Believe me when I say that this moment of de-escalation worked well for all of us!

3. Mute Your TV and Guess the Emotions

A fun way to help your child learn about emotions is by muting the volume on your television and then guessing the emotions of the actors. You can use the same game when you’re out in public places with your children. Take some time to sit down together and ‘people watch’. Try to guess the emotions of people walking past by observing their body language and facial expressions. Learning to read subtle emotional cues is a useful skill for your child to develop. For instance, the angle of a person's eyebrows and the shape of someone’s shoulders can tell us if that person is happy, angry or sad. This exercise can teach your children to distinguish fear from frustration, love from joy, curiosity from excitement, etc.

4. Temperature Check or Thumb-o-Meter

One quick technique you can use on a daily basis with your child to help them understand, label and express their emotions is the emotional temperature check where you each give a weather report of your emotions (i.e., sunny, stormy, mild with a chance of rain).

Another technique I use with Nick and Emily is the thumb-o-meter. Thumbs up means they are in positive mood, thumbs sideways means they are in neutral mood and thumbs down means that they're in a negative mood. After I see where their thumbs are pointed, I ask them to elaborate by telling me the specific emotions they’re feeling.

5. Bears App or Happify App

If your child is into technology (did I just write an oxymoron?) then you might like to check out the Bears app and the Happify app. The Bears app works well for younger children and has 48 illustrations of bears each showing different emotions through their facial expression and body language. Your child can swipe through the different bears to find the emotion they are feeling at that moment and you can use this to start a discussion. This is a good app to use when your child is in their downstairs brain.​You can also ask your child to show the bear that they think a friend, or someone else, is feeling. They can also use the bears to express how they felt after various experiences like a school excursion, winning a game, losing a game, fighting with someone, visiting their grandparent in the hospital and so on.

For teenagers, the Happify app is a great resource. The app and website have activities and games for your teenager to undertake, as well as, tracks to listen to. Happify is based on science of positive psychology and focuses on the five key areas of savoring, gratitude, generosity, meaning and empathy. Your child can keep their own profile and track the activities they are doing.

This is also a site for you to use. I like the savoring games and activities, as well as, ‘Today’s Grateful Moment’ diary where they have a specific section on promoting gratitude in families. I also like ‘Happify Daily’ which is a great way to get an injection of positivity with its inspiring and positive stories of human nature.​Happify has mindfulness tracks your child can listen to. Because mindfulness helps your child become aware of their present moment thoughts and feelings as they arise, your child will learn to notice their range of emotions and the relationship between their emotions and their strengths. Richard Davidson’s research has shown that people who undertake mindfulness courses have decreased activity in their right prefrontal cortex (the house of negative emotions) and increases in activity in their left prefrontal cortex (the house of positive emotions) at the end of the course compared to the start of the course. This is because they are learning how to detach from the negative thoughts and direct their thought towards the positive. Noticeable changes are seen in the brain in just 8 weeks.

6. Music

Music is a great way to help connect children with their emotions. Daniel Levitin’s research shows that when we listen to music almost every region and neural subsystem in our brain is activated. The particular combination of rhythm, timbre, pitch, volume and harmony evokes deeply held emotional response. Broadly speaking, songs in major keys and with fast tempos are interpreted by our brain as mood lifters. In contrast, slow songs played in minor key tend to make us feel sad or reflective.​My children have created a soundtrack based on all of their favorite songs ranging from Disney, hip-hop, classical, gospel, jazz and pop. The soundtrack includes songs that have upbeat melodies and songs with positive themes about love, happiness and friendships. Pharell Williams is a big hit in our household. We also include songs about resilience, triumph and overcoming negative events. ‘I’m a Survivor’ by Destiny’s Child, ‘Everybody Hurts’ by R.E.M and ‘Eye of the Tiger’ by Survivor are three of our favorites.

We put on the soundtrack and dance like crazy people in our living room. The music itself is uplifting, but by doing this on a regular basis with my children I am creating a positive memory association for them. I am also teaching that music is a tool they can use to help manage their own emotions.

7. Gratitude

The emotion of gratitude has received considerable attention from positive psychologists and it also happens to be one of my own favorite research topics. To feel thankful and have the ability to notice the good things around you is a powerful psychological tool for emotional management. Gratitude increases life satisfaction, happiness, and resilience. Putting on ‘gratitude glasses’ makes the good things in your life stand out like searching for Waldo with a pair of prescription glasses that are specifically designed to make him leap off the page.​The warm goo of gratitude works in a number of ways. First, gratitude creates a feeling of abundance because it helps us to see all the good things in our life. This feeling of abundance makes us feel satisfied with what we have and it counteracts a feeling that we are lacking or don’t have enough. Indeed, researchers have found that teenagers who are high on gratitude are less materialistic. Given that they don’t consider themselves to be lacking, they don’t have to fill the gap by purchasing things. This is especially important for kids in today's world who are bombarded by marketers telling them they are not good enough or don’t have enough unless they look, act, dress in a certain way. Gratitude has been shown to reduce resentment and bitterness and it works to counteract depressive thinking.

The second way gratitude works is that it strengthens our relationships. Psychologists classify gratitude as a social emotion which means it is an emotion that has positive effects on you and others. When we feel appreciation towards someone, more often than not we are motivated to thank the other person. The end result is that you get the warm feelings that prompted gratitude in the first place and the other person gets the warm feelings of being on the receiving end of your appreciation. Think about how good it feels when your son or daughter wrap their arms around you and thanks you for something you have done.

The function of gratitude is to bring people together. It is a bonding emotion. A social glue. Being a social emotion means it gives a ‘2 for the price of 1’ benefit and this is why I have become such a big fan of gratitude. It’s not that other positive emotions like joy and awe aren’t valuable, it’s just that in a family context prosocial emotions like gratitude have a ripple effect across all members.

Building an Emotionally Intelligent Brain

It’s never too late to start being an emotional coach. It doesn’t matter if your child is 2 or 22. The change starts with you. The most powerful form of emotional coaching comes through the way you understand and express your own emotions. All the activities I have suggested above are helpful to you too. Let your kids know what emotional weather you are, join in the Thumb-o-Meter game, get on to Happify, use the Mindfulness apps, let your kids know when you are in your downstairs brain, dance in the living room and express gratitude. If you and your kids regularly repeat the activities outlined here and make them part of your family routine you are doing way more than creating an emotional experience for your child in that moment, you are changing their brains and paving strength-based pathways for them.

***

Have Lea Speak at Your Next Event...

As a University researcher, Lea Waters, PhD, turns her science into strength-based strategies to help organizations, educators and parents around the world build resilience in their employees and children, helping them to thrive. Lea’s keynotes and talks offer her audience a unique blend of science and practice. To find out more about working with Lea or to book Lea for your next event, please fill out the online speaker form here.

This is Part 2 in a 3-part series on Emotions. You can read Part 1 here. Part 3 will be published in the coming weeks.

Your child’s emotions – positive and negative – provide important resources and information that help them navigate their strengths journey. This means that developing your child’s ability to tune into and harness their emotions in effective ways is a central part of Strength-Based Parenting.

How do you help your son or daughter to understand, manage and make the most of their emotions? To answer this question we turn to John Gottman’s research on the role of parents as emotional coaches.

But first, let’s start with your own parents. Think back to your childhood and answer how your parents most typically responded in situations like the following two:

Situation OneIf your pet died and you got upset would they:(a) Tell you they felt sad too;(b) Tell you not to think about;(c) Let you have a good cry;(d) Make you feel ashamed of being a 'cry-baby'.

Situation TwoIf you were excited and playing loudly in the kitchen would they:(a) Ask you to play more quietly or suggest you keep your game going and play elsewhere;(b) Make you feel guilty or ashamed for being too loud;(c) Let you play and have fun;(d) Get annoyed with you.

How did you parents fair?

The actions in answers a and c for both scenarios are typical of parents who are emotional coaches. But, if in the scenarios above, you answered b or d for your parents it probably means that your parents were what researchers call ‘emotion dismissing.’ Read more about both types below...

Emotional Coaches (A, C)

Parents who are emotional coaches consider that talking with their child about emotions is an opportunity for learning, connection and intimacy. These parents understand the function of emotions and are okay with the fact that kids feel a range of emotions. They see emotions as a portal that allow them into their child’s world. They know when to sit down and explore their child’s emotional reaction with them, when to give the child space so he can work through his own emotions and when to coach the child to not get overly attached to an emotional reaction. ‘Things will look better after a good night’s sleep and if you still want to talk about it in the morning I’m here for you.’ The key issue in all three of these responses is that the emotional coaching parents first think about the child’s emotions and decide whether to coach through direct intervention or by being more of a ‘guide from the side.’

Children growing up with parents who are emotional coaches learn to thoughtfully reflect on their emotions. They have an implicit sense that all emotions are acceptable. They recognize the early warning signs of distress and call on emotion adjustment strategies (e.g. deep slow breathing, re-framing, talking to a friend, exercising) before the emotion gets the better of them.

Psychologists and Neuroscientists have also found that children who grow up with parents who use emotional coaching have a calmer central nervous system, a lower resting heart rate and a healthier emotional brain circuitry. These are the kids who stay cool under pressure!​

Emotional coaching teaches a child when it is they need to explore their emotions and when it is that can put them into perspective and not worry too much. They teach a child how to enhance their positive emotions. Children with emotional coaching parents learn to be okay with experiencing sadness, guilt, frustration, and rejection because they accept that these feelings can be used effectively to motivate behavior. At the same time they learn how to savor their positive emotions and build up the positive energy and passion that keeps them motivated to develop their strengths

Emotion Dismissing (B, D)

Emotion dismissing parents can often be loving parents who want to be helpful but have formed the belief that emotions get in the way of thinking clearly. They believe that negative emotions are harmful, or they are uncomfortable themselves with negative emotions, so they seek to get rid of the emotion as quickly as possible by sweeping it under the rug. They may see positive emotions as trivial or a luxury. Some even see positive emotions as a bad thing.

These parents use dismissing strategies such as ignoring, distracting or shaming their children for having emotions.

Emotionally dismissive parents can sometimes be this way because their own negative emotions take priority in the relationship. This is often the case with parents who suffer from depression or anxiety. If your parents were like that then they probably reacted with impatience towards you when you were upset and possibly even punished you with their disapproval, ridicule or sarcasm for expressing your emotion.

​Children who grow up with parents who are emotion dismissers learn very little about their emotions. Compared to children of emotional coaches, these children have poor emotional literacy, cannot label their feelings very well and do not cope well with stress. Their feelings either end being ‘bottled up’ or ‘blown up.’ Good old emotional hydraulics, ey?​It is not just that emotionally dismissive parenting robs a child of the benefits of emotional coaching. Psychologists have shown that emotion dismissive parenting is a risk factor for poor mental health and poor physical health in children and teenagers. What’s more these kids are likely to experience depression and anxiety which has been shown to be negatively related to strengths.

What that means for you…

Most of us practice with our kids the methods we learned from our parents unless we make deliberate effort to change.You might be feeling a little bit daunted at the idea of being an emotional coach, especially if you were raised with emotionally dismissive parents. Believe me, I get your nervousness, but the good news is that becoming an emotional coach is a skill you can learn.

You too can become an emotional coach.

The first step in becoming an emotional coach is to question your own beliefs about the nature of emotions. If you have grown up believing that they should be avoided, now is the time to question that belief for the sake of your kids.

The second step in emotion coaching is to help your child to tune into and harness their emotions. More on that next week…

Stay tuned.

***

Have Lea Speak at Your Next Event...

As a University researcher, Lea Waters, PhD, turns her science into strength-based strategies to help organizations, educators and parents around the world build resilience in their employees and children, helping them to thrive. Lea’s keynotes and talks offer her audience a unique blend of science and practice. To find out more about working with Lea or to book Lea for your next event, please fill out this online speaker request form.

This is Part 1 in a 3-part series on Emotions. Part 2 will be published in the coming weeks.​Emotions provide your child with vital clues for identifying their strengths. Remember strengths are the things your child isgood at, feels good doing and chooses to do. While your child can learn about their strengths through high performance this can also be the sign of a learned behavior. It is only through their emotions that they’ll gain full insight into the later two aspects of a strength - energy and intrinsic motivation.

Teaching your child how to understand their emotions is, therefore, a critical aspect of Strength-Based Parenting. States of happiness, wonder, curiosity, joy, excitement or, for some children, serenity give you and your child a hint that they’re using their strengths. Conversely, feelings of distress, anger or frustration are emotions that come when using weaknesses or when a strength is being thwarted.

Being a Strength-Based Parent Means Being An Emotional Coach

Emotions are not only useful in identify strengths, they are also useful in developing strengths. While building up their strengths your child will undoubtedly experience setbacks along the way. They’ll need to learn how to effectively manage their negative emotions and, equally importantly, how to cultivate and sustain positive emotions. Being a Strength-Based Parent, therefore, means being an emotional coach so you can help your child use their emotions in ways that support the identification and cultivation of strengths.

The function of emotion is to energize behavior.

Psychologists classify emotions into one of two broad categories - negative and positive - both of which are helpful to us in different ways as was cleverly demonstrated in the Disney Pixar film ‘Inside Out.’

Broadly speaking, negative emotions help us in times of danger by motivating our ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response allowing us to attack or avoid the threat. Positive emotions, on the other hand, help us in times of safety by motivating our ‘broaden and build’ response allowing us to capitalize on the good times and helping us stockpile resources (psychological, physical and emotional) to use when we are next under threat.

Negative Emotions

Taking a closer look at negative emotions we learn that specific emotions serve specific purposes. Sadness tells us that something is missing, that we have experienced a loss, and motivates us to grieve. Disgust triggers our urge to repel such as spitting out poisonous food. Anger helps us assert our rights, set boundaries and protect the people we love. Guilt tells us that we’ve done something wrong and encourages us to repair, like when your child apologizes of their own accord for being rude to you. Frustration is the emotional messenger that lets us know we’re not achieving our goals and gives us energy to try harder.

Positive Emotions

Passion lets us know where our interest and desires lay. It builds the energy and intrinsic motivation behind our strengths. Hope propels us to invest in our future, build our strengths and achieve our goals. Love motivates us to take care of others. Joy creates the urge to play and through play we develop social skills, physical skills and problem solving skills. Contentment creates the urge to sit back and see the bigger picture. Gratitude propels us to reciprocate kindness. Awe inspires us to want to achieve our best.

Positive emotions have been shown to help us think more clearly, connect to others more effectively and be physically healthier. Laughter really is good medicine and positive emotions are correlated with better sleep, less pain, lower levels of cortisol, reduced inflammatory responses to stress, fewer injuries, lower blood pressure, and stronger immunity. Researchers have even found that positive emotions help you to fight off the common cold.

Positive emotions don’t just restore your child’s physical resources they also build your child’s cognitive and social resources. Quite simply, the way your son or daughter feels influences the way they think and relate to others. When they’re feeling positive they think more clearly, are better at problem solving, better at brainstorming, are more creative, and are better at seeing the larger picture. In a positive mood people think more in terms of ‘we’ than in terms of ‘me’, they help others more and they are less likely to engage in racial stereotyping. Moreover, our positive emotions make other people want to connect with us, serving to further strengthen our social bonds.

Emotions Help Develop Strengths

You can see then how positive emotions are an important resource for developing strengths. Firstly, they keep your child in good physical health which is an important prerequisite for achieving their potential. Secondly, positive emotions heighten your child’s cognitive capacities and support the rapid learning curve. Thirdly, they help your child connect with others. No strength is ever developed alone. Even if the strength is a solo endeavor your child still needs the wisdom and support of people around him. Finally, positive emotions build up resilience and neutralize the effects of stress, thus helping your child stick to the long journey of strengths development even when challenges and setbacks occur.

Negative emotions can serve as a useful barometer signaling the strength impeding environments in your child's life.

But let’s not forget negative emotions as they too play an important role in developing strengths. Chances are that situations or relationships which prevent her from using her strengths will lead to negative emotions. In this way her negative emotions serve as a useful barometer signaling to you the strength-impeding environments in their lives. You can’t be with your kids 100% of the time but you can check in on how they feel after the fact. If your child is in a strength enabling environment but is not living up to their potential you can bet that negative emotions like frustration or guilt may be an honest self-indicator telling them they’re not giving their full effort and motivating them to rise to the challenge

The Key

The key in all of these situations is that your child’s emotions – positive and negative – provide important information that help them navigate their strengths journey. This means that developing your child’s ability to tune into and harness their emotions in effective ways is a central part of Strength-Based Parenting.

In Part 2, I'll help you determine whether you’re currently acting as an emotional coach. In Part 3, I'll share a few tactics that I find helpful in getting my kids and clients to connect with their emotions.

Stay tuned.

***

Have Lea Speak at Your Next Event...

As a University researcher, Lea Waters, PhD, turns her science into strength-based strategies to help organizations, educators and parents around the world build resilience in their employees and children, helping them to thrive. Lea’s keynotes and talks offer her audience a unique blend of science and practice. To find out more about working with Lea or to book Lea for your next event, please fill out this form.

This is Part 3 in a 3-part series on Strength-Based Discipline. Click for Part 1 andPart 2.

Strength-based discipline is about working with a child to discover what’s blocking his progress and helping him get back on track. Whereas typical discipline techniques tell children what not to do, strength-based discipline goes a step further, letting our kids know what they can do—reminding them of strengths they possess to address the problem. We show them how to reach within to find the resources for change, rebound from setbacks, focus their attention on repairing the problem, and move in a more positive direction.

​There are times, of course, when you’ve got to confront weakness head-on. Maybe your child struggles in an academic subject but needs to achieve a certain grade in order to meet his educational goals. I wasn't good at math, but I had to do well enough to get into graduate school for psychology, survive statistics, and get my PhD, so I set about getting extra tutoring. Or maybe your child is impatient (like my daughter Emily) and needs to learn to manage those feelings better. After all, we all have weaknesses. My husband Matt and I think patience is such an important trait that we are working on it directly with Emily.

The key to working with weaknesses is to make sure your focus doesn’t become too deficit oriented.

Use gratitude, mindfulness, and self-control to ensure that your attention hasn’t been overly drawn to your child’s weaknesses. Do what needs to be done to address the weakness so that it’s not getting in the way of goals, good behavior, or performance, but don’t expect your child to turn a weakness 180 degrees into a strength.

Use the Three P's to Work with Weaknesses

At home and in my work with parents, I find that a three-pronged approach I call the Three P's can be effective in working with weakness:

1. Priming

What it is: In priming, you give the child a heads-up that he’s going into a situation where he will need to work with a particular weakness.

Success tips: Be calm and matter-of-fact. Life happens and we all sometimes have to deal with things we don’t like to do or aren’t good at. Ask the child what strengths he can draw on to manage his feelings. Suggest some circuit breakers the child can use if he starts to feel stressed. If possible, do your first priming processes in low-stakes, low-pressure situations, when both of you are feeling even-keeled and rested, so your child’s self-control—and yours—is likely to be strong.

Example: Emily’s impatience: “This is going to be a long car drive. It’s going to take us at least an hour. There’s a lot of traffic. I can’t do anything about it. I understand it’s annoying. It’s annoying for me, too. This is one of those situations where your being impatient is not going to get us there any faster. It’s just going to make you feel restless and annoyed and anxious. So be mindful of this as we go into the situation. What are some things we can do to help you feel less impatient during the car ride?” (To this, Emily will often suggest bringing a book, some artwork to do, or her finger puppets to play with.)

2. Present Moment

What it is: There are two levels to choose from:

Level One is simple mindfulness—flagging the issue for the child as the situation is happening to help the child prepare.

Level Two is actively working on the weakness in the moment. The more your child practices addressing her weakness in present-moment situations, the less dominant it becomes.

Success tips: Ideally, practice Level Two at a time when you and your child are feeling rested and able to practice mindfulness, unlikely to lose your tempers.

Example:

Emily’s impatience, simple mindfulness: “This is one of those times when I see your patience is being tested.”

Emily’s impatience, working on the weakness in the moment: “Now’s the time to take a couple of deep breaths and think about a different way of responding. Let’s look at it from another perspective. Is being impatient going to make the car drive any faster? Is it going to make the legal system change the speed limits? Is it going to make the other cars on the road get out of the way because there’s an impatient nine-year-old in the backseat of the car? Nope, impatience is not going to change things.”

3. Postmortem

What it is: Here you talk with your child after the fact to identify what happened, discuss how things went, look at what needs improvement, and agree on steps for getting there. A postmortem might happen a few minutes, hours, or days later (when everyone’s feeling cooler): “OK, let’s talk about what just happened/this morning’s test/the game last night/what happened the other day.”

Success tips: The goal here is to help the child become mindful about how events unfolded, how she was feeling, how she acted/reacted, and what she can do differently next time: “What was it about that situation that made you feel this way/do or say what you did? What strengths do you think might help you manage better? Is there a strength that needs to be dialed down or up? What do you think we could try so things might go better next time?”

Example: Emily’s impatience: If we've had a bad trip in the car I wait for an hour or so and then we talk about how it feels for her and we use curiosity to come up with some ideas for how to do things differently next time. I help her to see how her impatience makes things worse and how she has the capacity to make the car trips easier by changing her mindset.

Shifting the Trajectory: The Game-Changing Gifts of Strength-Based Parenting

I’ve only gone skiing once in my life, but when I did, I learned an interesting fact. I remember standing at the top of the mountain, snow sparkling all around. In front of me were two runs down the mountain. One side of the mountain was flatter and smoother. It would be a slower, more scenic, and, in my novice opinion, more enjoyable ski run. The other side of the mountain was distinctly steeper. It provided a faster, bumpier, and more dangerous ride. The distance between the two? Not much. All I needed to do was point my ski tips in a slightly different direction to have a very different experience of that mountain.

Strength-Based Parenting is about angling your ski tips just a little differently at the start of the run. As you practice Strength-Based Parenting, it’s not as though misbehavior will go away, nor that life challenges won’t continue to happen for you and your child. You still have to make it down the mountain, but you’re navigating a very different path through those challenges—one that I think will be smoother and will open up beautiful vistas for both of you. What’s more, you can access these powerful experiences through the small moments of parenting we encounter every day.

Moment by moment, Strength-Based Parenting creates small and achievable shifts that can positively change your child’s trajectory through life. I have seen many transformational outcomes in families in my years of developing and teaching Strength-Based Parenting. My hope for you and your child is a future fueled by strengths and filled with inspiring journeys of growth, adventure, and joy.

ICYMI: Part 1 and Part 2 in this 3-part series on Strength-Based Discipline

This is Part 2 in a 3-part series on Strength-Based Discipline. Part 1 can be found here.​I think the moments when our children make poor choices and get into trouble provide opportunities to talk to them about where they forgot to use their strengths or what strengths they need to call forward.

Whereas typical discipline techniques tell children what not to do, strength-based discipline goes a step further, letting our kids know what they can do—reminding them of strengths they possess to address the problem.

We show them how to reach within to find the resources for change, rebound from setbacks, focus their attention on repairing the problem, and move in a more positive direction.

If this sounds like we’re helping kids become mindful of their actions and building their ability to activate their nervous system’s pause-and-plan mode that can stand between them and their impulsiveness or lapses in judgment the next time around, you’re absolutely right. That’s the kind of discipline our children really need.

Five Questions Help Pinpoint Why Your Child is Acting Out

Last week, you used these five questions to diagnose your child’s strength breakdown:​

Is it strength overuse?

Is it strength underuse?

Is it the flip side of a strength?

Could it be a blocked strength?

Could it be forced overuse of a weakness or of a learned behavior?

Four Tactics for Putting Strength-Based Discipline into Practice

Once you've reviewed the five questions above and have gotten a handle on what might be happening, here are four tactics to try when faced with your child or teen's misbehavior:

1. Use Circuit Breakers to Reestablish the Strength Connection

Using the Strength Switch can really help us and our kids replenish self-control by calming the nervous system and shifting thinking from the emotion-driven limbic system to the rational frontal lobe, a driver of self-control. You can still let your child know his behavior was unacceptable, but the discussion will be more effective if you use these tactics to downshift to a calmer mode before addressing the situation:

Take some downtime. Say, “I need time to think about this before we talk about it.” Then go do a good goofing-off activity that settles your emotions. Perhaps suggest your child do the same.

Do a two-minute breathing exercise. There’s almost always time, even in a tough situation, to take a few deep, steadying breaths. This, too, calms the nervous system.

Spend some time feeling grateful. Bad things happen, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing in life to enjoy and appreciate. Find something to be grateful for. Be grateful that you even have a kid to argue with in the first place. Depending on your child’s mood, the two of you might do this together. Maybe try petting the dog together, taking a time-out for a snack, or walking around the block. It may calm the brain’s limbic arousal and help both of you get a better handle on feelings.

I introduce the idea of dialing up and dialing down strengths to the teachers and parents I work with. It’s effective in the classroom and one-on-one.

Basically, you suggest to the child that she needs to turn up or turn down the “volume,” or intensity level, on her strengths to address specific issues she’s dealing with. You’ll discover which strengths need to be dialed up or down by asking yourself if it’s a strength overuse or underuse (questions 1 and 2 above).

Doing this with your child helps her learn to regulate herself and understand that different situations call for different behaviors. You might even find that your child eventually turns the tables on you!​Henry is a social, rambunctious five-year-old with a boundless enthusiasm for life. We ask him to dial up or down his strengths in situations—e.g., kindness when he has hurt another, forgiveness when another has hurt him, patience when he needs to wait for what he wants—almost every day! One day when he noticed me impatiently flicking the radio stations in the car, he informed me that I needed to use more of my strength of patience!

3. Encourage a Strength versus Fixating on the Negative Behaviors

This tactic can create constructive dialogue around even serious behavior problems, as this school psychologist explains:

A tenth-grade boy at our school was getting into trouble, socializing with the wrong people, and he had just been caught shoplifting. He had already been suspended a few times and we were not expecting him to complete tenth grade. He and I did theVIA Survey of Character Strengths and identified, among other things, that leadership was one of his signature strengths. This discovery and our conversation about it proved pivotal. First, I think it was the first time he had ever received feedback that he had all of these good qualities inside. He was so touched to hear about them that he cried . Secondly, we were able to focus on fostering his leadership strength in healthy ways. We learned that outside of school he was a great rugby player and was the captain of his team. We were able to cultivate his leadership strength in school, and he successfully finished the year.

4. Substitute or Swap in a Strength

A friend of mine is a remedial massage therapist who always starts by working with the healthy tissue before she addresses the inflamed and injured area. If she starts directly on the injured tissue, her patients become rigid and the healing isn’t effective. Similarly, if you go straight for your child’s weakness, your child will naturally become defensive. You can help your child work on her weaknesses more effectively by starting first with her “healthy tissue”—her strengths. When Nick or Emily comes to me with a problem, I’ve trained myself to swap in a strength and ask: “What is a strength you have that can help you fix this?”

I wasn’t always so quick to take this approach. Emily would be the first to admit that impatience is a weakness of hers. When she was in the first grade, her teacher told me Emily was talking too much in class. It turns out Emily was finishing her work more quickly than her classmates and became impatient waiting, so she talked to her friends as they were trying to finish their work. I spoke to Emily a number of times about this and asked her to wait patiently. She didn’t exactly take my advice to heart. When she was sent to the school principal, I needed a new tactic.​I realized that I was framing the issue in terms of her weakness—the fact that she lacks patience. Instead of trying to minimize a weakness, I decided to maximize a strength. So I turned on my Strength Switch and thought about the positive feedback I’d gotten from her teacher at the parent-teacher conference the previous semester, when the teacher had praised Emily’s cooperative nature, her love of learning, and her kindness. Emily has been kind ever since she was very young, when she would share her toys, include people in her games, and go out of her way to make others feel good. Kindness is one of her core strengths.

I talked to Emily about how she could show kindness to her friends by letting them finish their work because it would make them feel good to have that sense of accomplishment, just as she felt good due to her own love of learning. I also suggested that she could show kindness and cooperation to her teacher by not disrupting the class.

As soon as I turned on my Strength Switch and reframed the situation through her strengths of kindness and cooperation rather than harping on her weakness of impatience, Emily immediately understood what she needed to do, and her classroom behavior improved.

Confronting Weakness Head-on

There are times, of course, when you’ve got to confront weakness head-on. I'll share more on that next week.

Author

Lea Waters, PhD, is one of the world’s leading experts on Positive Education, Positive Organizations and Strength-Based Parenting and Teaching. Lea is the president of the International Positive Psychology Association, and founding director of the Centre for Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne. Lea turns her science into strength-based strategies to help people thrive.